he air isn't salty in this first film by Alessandro Angelini but it certainly feels leaden with something. When Fabio (Giorgio Pasotti) is in court, the audience is unsure who's on trial. When a rock flies through his car window, we don't know what he's done. And when we find out that he works at a prison, we're unsure in what capacity. Such is the presumptuousness of the film, which confuses ambiguity for complexity. Nice try, except Angelini's film eventually settles into a predictable funk after Fabio learns that one of the prisoners under his watch is his father, who was sentenced to prison 20 years ago for killing a man. Not knowing whether to inform the former mafioso who ostensibly doesn't want anything to do with his family, Fabio secures a day release for the old man as a pretense to ingratiate himself into his life. Characters are prone to inexplicable enragement, and Fabio's is such that he takes his anger out on his jogging, a stupid movie cliché that never happens in real life. Jogging also figures prominently in The Son's Room and The Last Kiss, two films by directors Angelini no doubt aspires to. To his credit, he avoids the rank sentimentality of the Nanni Moretti film and the embarrassing soloplism of the Gabriele Muccino, but in spite of fusing elements from some of the most potentially hysterical genres of film—including the road movie, the reconciliatory father-son drama, and the disease-of-the-week melodrama—with relative ease, the film never grapples with its familiar parts in a particularly vivacious or unique fashion.

Feature: New Directors/New Films 2007